Odyssey 2020

The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop

The VOiCES from a Distance Challenge 2019: Analysis of Speaker Verification Results and Remaining Challenges

Mahesh Kumar Nandwana, Michael Lomnitz, Colleen Richey, Mitchell McLaren, Diego Castan, Luciana Ferrer, Aaron Lawson
The VOiCES from a Distance Challenge 2019 was held in early 2019 to foster research in the area of speaker recognition and automatic speech recognition (ASR) with a special focus on single-channel distant/far-field audio under various noisy condi- tions. The challenge was based on the VOiCES corpus collected in real reverberant environments. This paper provides details of the challenge and analysis of evaluation results for the speaker recognition task. For the speaker recognition task, a total of 21 international research organizations from academia and in- dustry participated in the challenge and submitted 58 valid sys- tems. We report an in-depth analysis of system performance of the top-performing systems for the task of speaker recognition broken down by multiple factors such as the room acoustics, microphone type, distractor type, and loudspeaker orientation. We also discuss the remaining challenges in far-field speaker recognition and suggest directions for future research.